The RIAA and NMPA are each seeking as much as $150B USD from Limewire. By contrast, the entire U.S. music industry made less than $10B USD in 2008, according to the RIAA. (Source: San Diego Serenade)

Limewire is the most used peer-to-peer engine today, having been downloaded over 200 million times. (Source: Myce)

NMPA seeks as much as $150B USD from Limewire; lawsuits may do little to slow filesharing though

Napster
fell. Kazaa fell. And now the RIAA is waging an all out
war to try to ensure Limewire follows in its P2P ancestors'
footsteps.

Even as the move industry turns its efforts
to suing
thousands of BitTorrent users, the music industry is waging its
own hard-fought war against filesharers. After a long and
unprofitable legal crusade, the RIAA has largely turned its efforts
to lobbying the government to take up the mantle of tracking and
prosecuting filesharers.

With the upcoming Anti-Counterfeiting
Trade Agreement the RIAA may have scored its biggest victory --
making it a felony
crime to develop P2P engines that become used to distribute
infringed content.

Not content to wait for the vote on that
measure, music labels have taken the fight to one of the
most-downloaded filesharing engines, Limewire. Since the
descent of Napster and Kazaa into legal and financial purgatory,
Limewire has emerged as perhaps the most recognizable P2P
engine.

The RIAA -- the music industry attack dog -- sue Limewire for $150,000 per infringed song way back in 2006.
However, LimeWire founder Mark Gorton had frustrated the
labels for almost four years. In May the labels secured a major
victory -- a summary judgment against Limewire for copyright
infringement, engaged in unfair competition, and induced copyright
infringement.

Last month the RIAA accused Gorton of shifting
his money to avoid paying damages from the case. They have
appealed to the courts to try to have
his assets frozen. They also filed a motion to have
Limewire's services shut down.

Now a coalition of four major
labels -- EMI, Sony/ATV, Universal and Warner/Chappell -- and four
independent labels -- Bug, MPL, Peermusic and the Richmond
Organization -- have filed a brand
new suit against the popular program. Represented by
the National Music Publishers’ Association (NMPA), the labels filed
suit in Southern District Court in Manhattan on Wednesday.

In
the suit, they also seek $150,000 USD per song distributed -- the
maximum for willful infringement. Limewire constitutes 58
percent of the P2P traffic online, according to the NPD Group.
Limewire software has been downloaded 200 million times, including
over 340,000 downloads in the last week.

Limewire has a legal
music store, which offers over
2 million DRM-free tracks for sale. However, the
service is also thought to host well over a million infringed
tracks. That puts a conservative estimate of the amount sought
in the new suit at $150B USD.

Even with Limewire's dominant
position in the P2P industry there's no way it could pay that much in
damages, as its assets sit in the millions, not billions. It's
hard to say what will happen in the case, but things thus far are
clearly not going Limewire's way.

Ultimately one possibility
would be a settlement, which would allow Limewire's music store to
stay open and continue paying damages to the RIAA and NMPA (the two
groups that have filed suit). It remains to be seen, though,
whether users would stick with the service if it went legit or leave
it, as has traditionally happened throughout filesharing history
(with
services such as Kazaa and Napster).

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It is these middle men that make me sick. When the artists die, the middle men continue to profit like fat hogs for years off of their works while their families and surviving relatives get very little.

It disgusts me. I guess we should also blame the artists for allowing themselves to be suckered into giving up all their rights to these wolves, but, there's nothing they can do about it once they sign the papers.

quote: Maybe we will one day live in a world where there are lots of artists, all selling their own music, through a market place that is not controlled by a few large players and world of mouth, the media will inform people about what is popular.

There already are. Just listen to a good college radio, no matter how old you are. We have an awesome one in Atlanta, 88.5 or Album 88. They have all sorts of interesting stuff on there. I am constantly amazed at how much talent is out there that most people _never_ hear about because of the RIAA and the sleazy big labels.

Yeah, there is a lot of talent out there. You can go down to any pub/club that has a live music on and the odds are that a couple of the bands or artists will be playing their own stuff that would easily be good enough to get on the the radio.

What I would like is for this to be more easily available to everyone, and not drowned out by the PR men of the big labels who swamp everything with the auto-tuned, middle of the road, meaningless pap, and the same old boy bands and teen pop "sensations" that tap into the pre-teen market because they are all over the TV/radio.

It's sad that you just see the same thing repeated again and again, on a 5 or 6 year rotation with slightly different faces, but doing almost exactly the same thing.

quote: Yeah, there is a lot of talent out there. You can go down to any pub/club that has a live music on and the odds are that a couple of the bands or artists will be playing their own stuff that would easily be good enough to get on the the radio.

LOL where do you live? Most live music I've heard in clubs or bar/restaurants sounds like B grade garage music. That's the problem today, this stuff IS "good enough" to get on the radio. It shouldn't.

"We are going to continue to work with them to make sure they understand the reality of the Internet. A lot of these people don't have Ph.Ds, and they don't have a degree in computer science." -- RIM co-CEO Michael Lazaridis